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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25010329">One Look And You're Hypnotized</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiltedspacemittens/pseuds/quiltedspacemittens'>quiltedspacemittens</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Good Omens (TV), Good Omens All Media Works</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst with a Happy Ending, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Crowley's Moustache (Good Omens), Implied Sexual Content, Other, References to Ancient Greek Religion &amp; Lore, Sappho ships it, The Mamma Mia! Cinematic Universe, The Music of Abba, Tony's magic mustache, but we're up to like eight latin words, crack treated so seriously it devolved into angst, i left the plot in the car for two weeks and it turned into queen music, potentially erotic sort of woundcare, reflections on theism, slightly classier than aristophanes but only slightly, ubiquitous references to astronomy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 05:35:09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>10,971</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25010329</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiltedspacemittens/pseuds/quiltedspacemittens</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“What are you doing in Greece?” Aziraphale asks, with distanced politeness, as the silence between them stretches a moment too long.<br/>Crowley ambles, one step behind him. “’M here on business. Supposed to tempt some poor woman to engineer a decades-long inheritance and property tax evasion scheme. Something about her ex-boyfriends.”<br/>“I see. And she’s on Kalokairi?”<br/></i><br/>Kalokairi, Greece, 1977. One moustachioed demon on business, one clean-shaven principality on holiday, and one island in need of a little divine intervention.<br/><br/>A Mamma Mia!-themed Tony fic written for Stayin' Julive aka Tony Month. Hypothetically updates every Wednesday in July. Title from "Angeleyes" by ABBA.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Stayin' Julive - The Tony Month Collection</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Mamma Mia! (Here I Go Again)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Intellectually I know Mamma Mia! doesn't take place in the 70s but spiritually I know it absolutely takes place in the 70s.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Greece, 1977</p><p>Crowley has seen Mount Olympus. He has. He’s glared at it, looming in the middle distance, on a postcard rack in the Athens airport. He’s never been in person. He has no need of twelve-god pantheons. They are foreign to demons, to those without faith. There is one God and She has deserted this taxi, trundling north along a skinny, wind-whipped isle. The car rattles over dirt roads towards the coast, hurtling Crowley ever closer to the sea, to the saltwater mass of it, bobbing against wooden-limbed docks. Eager, persistent. The hallmarks of a good temptation. Crowley frowns behind his purple-tinted sunglasses, focuses his attention on the shrubland instead. Sharp-tendrilled bush, green mottled with a parched brown. Hillside lingering between the two shades. Only a few pink flowers, borne back into a distant spring, to break up the dull landscape.</p><p>Crowley twiddles the wings of his moustache experimentally. He could squeeze a few drops of nectar out of them, probably. The drink of the gods, immortality rippling in a ladle. Enough to slake this supernatural thirst. Saltwater dehydrates human bodies, even as they wring it out of themselves, sweat and tears and oil. Crowley licks his upper lip, tonguing against the unruly hairs that have positioned themselves as disparately as possible. He brings a finger up, flattens them out ineffectively.</p><p>Crowley doesn’t have oil in his skin, not like humans do. He must make an effort to tick along, wind his counterclockwise gears. Humans secrete oil through the sebaceous gland. Crowley understands this process, intellectually. See how the oil gathers, slips out the hair follicle, out into the wide world of this well-mapped skin. Slides down the shaft of a single hair, keeps it hydrated, greasing the wheels of these dead cells, brimming from human skin. Regeneration, wrapped in ember-red.</p><p>Crowley checks his watch. A Swiss-made, expensive thing, chunky on his wrist, glittering obsidian. Can tell the time in twenty world capitals and also the bottom of the Mariana Trench. He reads the white-paint numbers, grimaces. The gullies in his face, the canyons, the river carves them out instantaneously, filling and emptying in a single second. The tide goes out, comes back in. He clears his throat, taps on the glass dividing him from the driver’s seat with one door-hinge knuckle. Like a spoon against a champagne flute. <em>Pay attention</em>. “I might just make the ferry to Kalokairi if you take me all the way to the end of the dock.” Listen for the lowest note. Politeness glides off his well-oiled voice.</p><p>“Yes, sir, Antonios,” the driver replies, shaking long, stringy hair from his face and determinedly pressing the accelerator to the floor.</p><p>“Tony,” Crowley corrects, in a flat, beleaguered sort of way. His neck turns splotchy, and he itches around his moustache with a mindless vigor. He checks his watch again.</p><p>A pastel taxi swerves out in front of them, at a protractor-precise angle. Crowley and the driver swear in unison, the driver in Greek, and Crowley in what could pass for Cretan. There used to be more dialects here, a Babel-scape flatland. Each city-state had its own dialect, its own Olympus, its own avatars of the gods, nursing favored bodies, favored forms. Crowley had known them all, taken stock of each metropolis’s faith, provided accordingly. Times call for a god of war, a god of peace. A god of discord and harmony and maybe one for the fallow fields. Times and seasons. Works and days. Follow the sun through the sky, through each revolution. Watch carefully, observe when to reap, when to sow.</p><p>“Pass this idiot,” Crowley barks, jerky from the sudden braking.</p><p>“Rival taxi company,” grumbles the driver. “He will not get away with this.” So he has sworn revenge. There is a god for that, somewhere in the pantheon, waiting to be invoked in the acropolis, among the olives and the cassia.</p><p>Human DNA is double-stranded. Two helices, curving around each other, spiral staircases, building up a person. Connected by nucleotide bridges, pre-ordained pairs. Won’t work otherwise. Two taxis, old with broken window cranks, twisting, surging towards the coast. The staircase leads down, to the water. To the brine of the seas, to the mouthful of dehydration. To sun-lit and wine-dark temptation, waves gentling away sobriety. Crowley clenches his teeth, undoes another button on his shirt. Adjusts the wings of his collar, pointing firmly downward. Arrow-points, burying themselves in the soil, seeking scrambling purchase on hard-leafed, spiny shrubs.</p><p>The thing with polytheism, the kind the Ancient Greeks practiced, is that the gods are in everything. They’ve staked claims on each inch of the known world, divvied up the spoils of the earth. She is in everything, yes, but unvaryingly. The God in the sky and the God in the sea are the same. The God in Crowley’s fire-red taxi with a disco ball dangling from the rearview mirror and the God in that atrocious mint one, just ahead of him, are, unfortunately, the same. The Greeks would assert the presence of two opposing gods, duking it out over these two unassuming pawns, fleeing to the coast.</p><p>The taxi crests the last vanguard of hills, catches a little air, slams back down on the gravity-drunk earth. Crowley’s heart leaps into his throat, lodges there, stuck between the flaps of his vocal cords. He readies himself, girds his ankles in his heeled boots, squeezes the leather handle of his suitcase. It pinches against the folds of his palm, his lifeline. He swallows down his fear. He will make the ferry. The town stretches in front of him, narrow cobblestone alleys that his driver whips through blindly, miraculously avoiding sheep and children and badly-behaved mutts with inside-out ears. A church bell peals. <em>Give us this day our daily bread. </em>There is only one God now, a pantheon of twelve under Her. John was here once, Andrew too. Fishers of men.</p><p>The ferry is passenger only, no cars on Kalokairi. Crowley can bemoan the poor aesthetic choices all he likes, but he will be glad to leave the taxi. He can see the small ship, cargo on top, people on bottom, begin to pull away. The island is only a dot in the distance. Sweat beads on his forehead, his upper lip, dampens his moustache. They blow through the gateway, past the point where motor vehicles (of any sort) are allowed. The other taxi follows suit. Both drivers, neck and neck, roar to the end of the dock, stop inches from each other, expel their passengers with a pristine efficiency. Crowley wobbles in his boots, over-stuffed suitcase dropping to the ground.</p><p>“Wait!” he shouts after the ferry, running the remaining few feet to the edge of the concrete. He thinks of slipping off, falling down, tangling in the open arms of kelp and seaweed. He halts, just one step from the edge, forlorn. The ferry has paid him no heed. It was foolish of him to think they would return, for him. A man-shaped being dressed in hemlock and cyanide. A man-shaped being, so obviously from the city, shrouded in the continent, dressed in Milan or Paris or London. A walking fashion capital, not fit for the sheep that cloud his view of the shrub-hills. He’s not from here, he’s never been from here, never managed to shave down his corners, round out his edges, wedge himself in a white-washed house with a blue dome roof, bring his missalette to church on Sundays. He couldn’t meet the eyes of the icons. <em>Theotokos</em>. God-bearer.</p><p>“Bollocks.” The occupant of the other taxi has caught up to him. He is wearing a three-piece suit. Crowley feels slightly less out of place. He is now only the second-worst-dressed man-shaped being in Greece.</p><p>“My sentiments exactly.” He hasn’t seen Aziraphale in a decade. Not since 1967, cradling the blessed seas between his two hellfire hands, ensconced in tartan-disguised metal. Shielding itself, shielding him. They were protected from each other, and now he meets his fear, head on in front of the open water. Aziraphale had passed the thermos to him, bridged the gap between their leather armrests, between the icebergs floating on the boundless ocean, shackled with too-heavy loads. Ironclad ships, defensible against boarding. Don’t come into range of my grapeshot, my cannons can fire two miles across the water. Stay out of sight, let only furtive rowboats pass between us.</p><p>“Shame neither of us has access to a sailing vessel,” says Aziraphale, in a tone that suggests he very much does and is rubbing it in.</p><p>“Shame neither of us looks like a nineteenth-century advertisement for heat stroke,” Crowley retorts, weakly.</p><p>Aziraphale acknowledges his poor comeback with a pitying look, lower lip curled down, revealing the pink of his mouth, matching the flowers on the hill, clinging to spring like Aziraphale clung to the handpress and the phonograph and socks without elastic. Crowley is caught there, in that vernality. New life. Resurrection, ever-dropping from his lips.</p><p>“How unfortunate.” Aziraphale continues with the exaggerated sympathy. He peers at the timetable, an easel between them, spread unassuming on the pavement. It’s only a few feet high, but it is a sufficient barrier.</p><p>A Greek creation myth posits that the original four-legged, two-headed humans were divided in half by Zeus, fed up with their insolence, fearing their power. Doomed them to spend all their days wandering in search of wholeness. Covered them with a sickly patina, a seamless garment of skin over their bisected hearts. Crowley wonders if She has ever been afraid of humanity. The intensity stemming from mortality, fragility, incompleteness.</p><p>Aziraphale is turned toward him to read the sign, and Crowley can see his unflustered elegance, the stiff and smooth and unwrinkled folds of his trousers, the delicate ivory white buttons, the wings on his cufflinks. “I’m afraid the next ferry doesn’t come until Monday.” He looks up at him, meets Crowley’s eyes, in purple-tinted sunglasses, the color of royalty. The color of a demon who would threaten Zeus with his insubordinance. The lenses are lighter than they used to be, the shape of his eyes visible beneath them. Yellow and purple are complementary colors. Crowley’s read the theory. Yellow is primary, the unalterable bile of him, the desert scrub, parched. Layer over it with purple, a smokescreen, a secondary defense, robes like fig leaves.</p><p>Aziraphale’s eyes mirror the waves. Blue and grey and green, wine-dark and wine-pale. Rose-cheeked and honey-skinned. He turns back for his suitcase, a tartan carpetbag. “If you don’t break your ankles in those <em>ridiculous</em> boots first, Crowley.”</p><p>“It’s Tony,” Crowley knee-jerks into correcting. Everyone in Greece had insisted on referring to him as “Antonios.” It sounded baptismal and pious and made his moustache drip boiling oil onto his velvet suit jacket.</p><p>“Is that what you’re going by, nowadays?” Aziraphale’s amusement weaves its way into his voice, unrestrained.</p><p>“You don’t like it?” Another kneejerk.</p><p>“I didn’t say that,” Aziraphale says primly, beginning to walk back down the dock. Crowley follows, like he always does. Hot on the heels of an angel, trying to catch that heavenly updraft. Find himself suspended above the Earth, looking down on Babel, Olympus, ziggurats and cathedral spires and minarets. God is up there, in the thermosphere, putting on a light show in the far north. Set ladders against the snowdrifts, mount the spiral staircase to the holy city, up and up, round and round, shaking with dizziness (we all fall down).</p><p>The sea will pass away. We will be landlocked, arid, no river runs through the new Jerusalem. Endless expanse of desert, this leeward side. Divided from you by a mountain range, you in the fertile crescent, the new Eden, the new heaven and the new earth. What is the chief end of man? It is this, Mount Everests dividing you from me, no timetable easels in Greek, no grimy blue plastic, warped from the beating sun. No leather armrests or garden walls or Regency snuffboxes. Pawns in an ineffable game, chess pieces, black and white.</p><p>“What are you doing in Greece?” Aziraphale asks, with distanced politeness, as the silence between them stretches a moment too long. Unflappably propitious, he knows all the cues, reads all the signposts, counts all the beats in his golden-tousled head.</p><p>Crowley ambles, one step behind him, watching how the hem of Aziraphale’s trousers falls exactly against the rim of his shoe, the worsted wool kissing the lip of the perforated leather. “’M here on business.” They reach the other end of the dock, the concrete pier slotted into the roadway like a jigsaw. Like it belongs here, braces and concrete and i-beams. Cement pourers and a steamroller and a digger, damming the water. An arbitrary boundary, separating the wheat from the chaff. “Supposed to tempt some poor woman to engineer a decades-long inheritance and property tax evasion scheme. Something about her ex-boyfriends.”</p><p>“I see. And she’s on Kalokairi?”</p><p>“Yeah.” Crowley lopes behind him, moving right to left, behind the bastion of Aziraphale, impervious to the sandstorms gritting against Crowley’s bones. “What’re you here for?”</p><p>“I’m on holiday. I wanted to go to Patmos, but it’s, ah, off-limits currently.”</p><p>“The dinosaur thing?”</p><p>“Yes,” Aziraphale says dejectedly. “I’d had word of a manuscript, too.”</p><p>“Mmm,” Crowley fake-pouts. “Now you’ll just have to spend your holiday on one of the most idyllic islands in the world. How dreadful.”</p><p>“I chose this place for a reason.” Aziraphale switches his carpetbag to his left hand, the back of it thumps against Crowley’s knee, once, and he jumps back. Lets the barrier rise, like a floodwall, a tsunami sucking out the tide. “There’s a very early shrine to Sappho on Kalokairi.”</p><p>“Of course. You can’t get divinely-inspired manuscripts, so you go straight to homoerotic poetry.”</p><p>“I wouldn’t say I go <em>straight.</em>” Aziraphale moves off to the left, toward the nicer end of the harbor. Crowley makes a noise in his throat resembling a yelp, as his heart catches there again, a fish in a net. Tangled in the flaxen mesh, unable to escape the thin, well-mended wiring. Aziraphale turns his head a little, easily and naturally, and favors Crowley with a smile. Crowley’s heart wriggles itself deeper, tighter still, unextractable without help.</p><p>“Here we are.” Aziraphale stops before a small, broad, outlandishly new boat. It has two masts, miraculously fitted with modern-looking sails.</p><p>“Argo.” Crowley reads the inscription on the side.</p><p>Aziraphale beams with pride, and Crowley wishes he could bottle his smile like ocean-water, build a replica ship in it, display it on his mantelpiece, infuse it with memory, with strength. Something to keep him going, to keep the tide rocking him against the shoreline. He suddenly feels exhaustion drop onto his shoulders, and his reservoir of stupid jokes immediately dries up. He manages a half-hearted eyeroll as Aziraphale clamors down onto the deck. “Let’s see if I remember how to start up the motor.” He rushes toward the deckhouse.</p><p>The sun is beginning to set, slipping behind the sentry line of hills, the last defense between the sea and the land. It shines into the front window of the wheelhouse, where Aziraphale is undoubtedly fiddling with the controls, like he fiddles with cards and trick coins and magic hats. Crowley lounges on the foredeck, against the white fiberglass surfacing. He snaps his fingers lazily and the engine starts, all Aziraphale’s dials read correctly, and the ship is unmoored. Crowley watches Aziraphale in the wheelhouse with narrowed eyes, expecting him to come out at any minute, to ignore the proper running of the ship and lounge with him on the deck. They are moving out into open water now, but no such luck. Crowley lies back, watches the first stars flicker on. Vega and Deneb and Canopus. He finds Aquarius. <em>Water-bearer. </em>Dumping his water out over the ecliptic, runoff from the void-sky filling the Tigris and the Euphrates. Silt fertilizing the Garden of Eden, cordoning off paradise.</p><p>How long ago since that first night. Since the first rainfall, Aquarius’s first stumble. A wing to guard him from Zeus’s wrath. Rain god and cloud-gatherer. Aziraphale exits the wheelhouse, on the starboard side. Hands clasped behind his back. He tilts back his head, watches the stars winking over the water, moonlight shining in his meteorite-ash hair. Look up, fasten a rope to heaven and lay hold. Crowley has, watching Aziraphale take in the heavens. He thinks of the thermos in his office safe, behind demonically reinforced steel and fifteenth century parchment.  <em>I could never let you go. </em>He has anchored himself to Aziraphale like the moon to the Earth. He controls the wind and the water, the ungodly things, present in the abyss before She made the heavens and the earth and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. He has rope burns on his palms, seared in like hellfire, like blitzed flagstones, and he clutches the stinging rawness close to his chest. An applecore keepsake to shove into his ribcage, to perch between silver bars.</p><p>Crowley thinks of shadow, the umbra and the penumbra. The moon moves a little farther from Earth each year. In a few hundred million years, we will no longer have total solar eclipses. Crowley thinks of this, thinks of being prevented from blocking out the resplendence of the sun, thinks of no longer shading Aziraphale from its harshness. Gravity will win the tug-of-war, bash him to and fro, send him into the soreness of the storm. He will shrivel up, sun-dried and choked. No more than a seed on rocky soil, forever at apogee.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Thank you for reading! May you all have a wonderful Tony Month!<br/>Start ABBA discourse with me on tumblr <a href="https://theseedsofdoom.tumblr.com">here.</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Honey, Honey (There's No Other Place in this World I'd Rather Be)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>CW for Crowley doing weird, non-human things with his moustache. Not body horror so much as selective adherence to minor details of human biology.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A pomegranate traditionally has six hundred and thirteen seeds. One for every law of the Torah. Each bite contains multitudes. Spit them out, one by one, springing up like a shoot from the hollow of your tongue. There. You are trapped in the underworld, half the year, from reaping to sowing. You must labor in the yellow-bellied heat, the rest of the time. Bring in the harvest so no one will starve this winter. Persephone and Eve, grief-howling mothers and death-mongering spouses. Linger in the in-between space, on the flat-raft of Charon’s ferry, for the season-change, the rigmarole of equinoxes and solstices. Stay here. Don’t turn back.</p><p>Aziraphale had suggested it: “What would you say to some <em>baklava</em>?” He’d been waiting on the pier for Crowley, already prepared to head off, hands folded in front of his waistcoat, ends of his sleeves resting exactly against the open sides of his topcoat.</p><p>Crowley had spent the day in reconnaissance work. He’d ascended to the villa on the peak of the island, where his target resided. He’d done the necessary observations, poking into buildings in various states of disrepair, and inspecting with some interest the temporary bar being erected partway down the hill from the villa.</p><p>He rarely ascends anything. The view from the top was magnificent, the open water stretching to the south beneath him, the whole island spread crisply in front of him. Forests and shrubs, rocks and sand. Crowley’s heart had throbbed, briefly.</p><p>Death rode into the world between his sabre fangs. Venom and saliva mingled on a single fruit, a pale rider loosed. Evergreen life and verdant death intermingled. Caught in this two-step, two sides of the same coin, this obolos to pay the ferryman’s toll. <em>Viaticum</em>, provision for the journey, bread money sacrificed to the underworld, which has no need of human currencies. The afterlife is transactional. You could come and go, regardless of season, if you hadn’t eaten the forbidden fruit.</p><p>Crowley is panting as he and Aziraphale climb the steep main street of the town, up from the beach. His shoulders slump, his legs scream. The air is thin here, wispy and salt-buoyant. He lags behind Aziraphale, who walks briskly and with fortitude, pausing once to wipe his forehead, the rest of him remaining perfectly arranged.</p><p>Crowley was rewritten in wormwood and sulfur once, long ago. Sharp-toothed and acid-blooded. Eyes like gold, like greed. Go west, to the undiscovered country, dip your wire-bottomed pan into the water, see what you can dredge up. Everyone’s doing it nowadays. Leave your well-appointed job, your heavenly city, succumb to the dreams of glory that bubble up in you day after day. They’ve built a railroad now, golden spike in the connection of west and east. A rendezvous point. No turning back. It’s easy to go transcontinental, make it to the other coast, endless waters lapping against the seashore, beating into God’s green earth. Crowley had hurtled down to the end of the line, the edge of the water, sunk there. Below sea level, a tidepool intermittently flooded. The air was heavy and humid and dense.</p><p>He went west, as to be in the eyeline of the sentry post on the eastern gate. Visible as he crosses the sand dunes, a protean, ever-shifting landscape under his stomach. Is death necessary for life? Did something have to die for them to meet, for the apple seeds to take root in his stomach, the breath of life nurse them there? The wreck of the garden, walls turned to sand, buried and forgotten. He will not forget. He won’t, he can’t. Every creature and flower and wild beast is just static, background noise throwing Aziraphale’s face into harsh relief, into screaming color. He cannot help but memorize the backdrop of this bold-stroke painted memory.</p><p>Aziraphale stops in front of a squat little building, white-washed and red-roofed. He wipes his palms on his pants. “Here we are.”</p><p>Crowley catches up to him, wheezing a little. “Should have brought the iron lung. Too old for this stuff nowadays.”</p><p>A fond smile flickers over Aziraphale’s face. “Well, I’m glad you wore your mountaineering boots.”</p><p>Crowley sneers at him, fully prepared to defend his platform black boots with his life, even if he does have blisters rapidly forming on his ankles.</p><p>Aziraphale crosses his hands in front of him again, exactly as put together as when they’d started the trek. He so rarely exhibits this quiet strength, Crowley thinks, racking his brains for another instance. And yet, Aziraphale is constructed from strength, resilience the star-core of him. Where Crowley has flimsy birch paper, Aziraphale is built of bark, stiff and armored. A steel spine, so contrary to the pervasive softness he exudes. It feels almost inside-out to Crowley, the vulnerability on the outside, the strength on the inside. Crowley buries himself, six feet under, stacks layers and layers over it. Wraps a skeleton around it, puts up his easily bruised skin as one final shield.</p><p>“Shall we?” Aziraphale gestures with one hand, palm flat and open. <em>After you. </em>Crowley stumbles forward, pushing into the café. The interior is dark, with orange-lit sconces on the walls, rustic little tables and chairs, and a bar and display case at the front. Crowley folds himself into the corner to stare vapidly at the wine, while Aziraphale begins to peruse the baklava, chatting animatedly with the clerk in Greek, although whether Aziraphale ever updated his lexicon from a few millennia back remains an open question.</p><p>Greece is a country of islands, rising and falling with the seas. Crowley sits down at a round wooden table, gets a splinter. He feels unmoored, at the mercy of the tides, lost in the Aegean, home to Calypso and Circe and Polyphemus. The sea could take him over, soon. The tide come in and not go back out. He grips the sides of the table forcefully, feeling the thin laurel wood might crack under his hands. The spindly iron bars of his seat press into his thighs.</p><p>It’s been a decade. Ten years, counted out like rosary beads, thumb rubbing raw under twisted cord. Each year a rose, red and white. Montagues and Capulets. Deny thy mother and refuse thy name. They meet somewhere in this dance between heaven and hell, hide themselves in the cinquepace. It’s easiest to disappear in a crowd, to pass notes in a room full of busy hands. A street lined with parked cars is a simple place to repair the universe, to satiate the black hole of things unsaid with one bottle of water.  </p><p>For now. The drought has been appeased, temporarily. There’s a contingency plan.  </p><p>Aziraphale plunks down the well-stacked platter of baklava. Ten years away from Aziraphale means that Crowley has forgotten how to watch him eat. Aziraphale spears a piece of baklava with his fork, lifts it to his mouth. Crowley averts his eyes, stares at the table grain instead.</p><p>Ten years is not a long time, in the grand scheme of things. It was nothing like the eighty years. Four score, a different measuring stick necessary to prevent the years from dragging so heavily. A whole human life. Crowley existed before time itself. Before God had put a great yellow almanac in the sky, before deciduous forests and snowpeas and St. John’s wort. Wet and dry seasons, monsoons and dust bowls come knocking. He’d felt the essence of time itself, worming his way through the lithosphere, an Archimedes screw. Abiding by human rules for once. Observing sunup and sundown ruthlessly. Punch his timecard scrupulously. Hide in the sundial shadows.</p><p>Aziraphale swallows, making an appreciative sound in his throat. “You <em>must</em> try a piece, my dear. They’ve done the layers just perfectly.”</p><p>Crowley reaches for his fork with false reluctance. Slices into a corner. The pastry is constructed of many paper-thin layers, peeling and crinkling.</p><p>They’d never been around long enough to determine if the garden had seasons. There’d been no rains, no cold snaps. Would the apple have fallen from the tree, eventually? Was the crime in taking it, or eating it? The soft flesh, white and sweet. Would it have been a sin to retrieve it from the forest floor? Should they have left it for compost, let another tree grow from it, water it and tend it carefully, pack soil around it, swaddle it like a child. Break his back pulling weeds, checking each leaf for blight. Another apple will grow, from the decomposition of the first, the old world fruit. Can we eat this one? This fresh, ripe golden delicious, color and taste all wrapped up in one. Quarter the apple, draw out the seeds. Toss the core back into the maw of the earth. Scatter the seeds along this trail like breadcrumbs. They will find their way back to this place, to paradise. To the shade of low-hanging storm clouds, fogging up God’s bifocals.</p><p>Aziraphale searches his face as Crowley chews, ignorant of its flavor, preferring to drink in Aziraphale’s eyes instead. They’re exacting, incisive, omniscient. “’S good.” Crowley has to pace himself, keep Aziraphale’s eyes from boring into his skull, finding the forest that grows there. “Tell me about this manuscript business.”</p><p>Aziraphale brightens immediately, looks away, caught up in his excitement. Crowley exhales, relieved he is out from under the microscope, shivers without the close-peering observation. The manuscript is, Aziraphale tells him between dainty, luxurious bites, a very early copy of the Book of Revelation. Which the bastard already <em>has</em>, although that doesn’t diminish its spectacular value. The trouble being, large portions of a dinosaur skeleton had been unearthed on the island, and most of it was inaccessible because of the paleontologists swarming the place. Aziraphale shakes his head sadly. “The irony is not lost upon me, my dear boy.” He swallows a small corner and hums in appreciation. “But I’ve been strictly forbidden from contributing ethereal essence of any sort to the dinosaur project.”</p><p>Crowley groans. “I see heaven still hasn’t developed a sense of humor. <em>Project. </em>The dinosaurs are supposed to be a <em>joke</em>, angel.”</p><p>Aziraphale shrugs and pops half a piece into his mouth. “Oh dear.” He wrinkles his nose. “This one has dreadfully little honey.”</p><p>Crowley frowns in commiseration, but Aziraphale is looking at him expectantly. The microscope again. Adjusting the focus, dialing ever closer. Crowley shoves his sunglasses up further on his nose and squeezes his eyes shut. He makes a small anatomical adjustment. The oil in his sebaceous gland thickens, the salt vanishes. Turns to honey. Work of bees, molded in his hands. Lashed to the mast, straining to muffle the sirensong. He twists the left wing of his moustache like a crank until a drop of honey beads from his hair follicle. Crowley pressures the surface tension to increase, until the honey falls from his moustache onto the baklava. He turns his moustache, vice-like, coaxing a few more drops out before switching to the other side.</p><p> “Oh, thank you.” Aziraphale gives him an infinitely grateful look and Crowley thinks he could handle eternal celestial harmonies if it means getting stuck with this particular siren.</p><p>Crowley’s spent six thousand years prepared to go down with this ship, resisting with all his might the urge to jump over, to abandon all he’s got and swim for a distant shore. Lured in by a sunlit gaze, never dimming. Flop helplessly on the beach and offer himself up.</p><p>They could carve out their own isle in this endless sea of rocking ships, of territorial skirmishes and unnavigable waters, the border a tangled maze. Circumnavigate me, he thinks. Turn your ship around, weave through the rocky straits. There’s not much after that. Just the open ocean and me on the other side of it. Cross the barren blue. How fractal the planes of existence are now, how stiff-bounded and delineated. One cannot slide between life and death, heaven and hell and in-between with ease and a few small coins. Let us twine ourselves, this porphyra-dyed thread, in between the knit of the fabric of the universe.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Writing this chapter was like pulling teeth. If you've made it this far, thank you.<br/>Find me on tumblr <a href="https://theseedsofdoom.tumblr.com">here.</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Lay All Your Love On Me (Don't Go Wasting Your Emotion)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>CW for more of the same re: weird moustache stuff.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Crowley has spent most of his time in Greece shuffling along behind Aziraphale like a petulant child. He’s almost jealous of him. No, it’s not the yacht. Aziraphale oohs and aahs over the flora and fauna and citizens, buys their dinky arts and crafts. He chats to them in Greek, they offer him free stuff. Crowley scowls in the background, and Aziraphale gives the shop owners apologetic smiles. <em>Don’t mind him. </em></p>
<p>Crowley is great at not being minded. It’s one of his best skills. He’s ignorable, he is. Right down to the platform boots and the velvet and the sunglasses indoors and the obviously not-homegrown moustache. He takes advantage of his skill, skives off work, miracles himself around the Aegean in a dinghy. Rows some. It’s like muddling cherries in the bottom of an old-fashioned. Scull the sugar through the water until the mixture thickens. Syrupy sweet. Disgusting. Notes of citrus, Aziraphale’s voice winding its way down his throat. The slight burn of the whiskey.  </p>
<p>Crowley gets the rowboat going at about seventeen and a half knots, lies back. That’s how they used to bury warriors. They’d lay them out in rowboats, set them on fire, push them out to sea. He could fall off the other side of the world, find himself in the belly of the whale (repent, oh Nineveh. Ashes and sackcloth. Whatever).</p>
<p>He was never a warrior, that’s the thing. People like to picture soldiers as heroic and valiant, full of action and marching and starving in trenches. Working your way up the ranks with your bayonet, stuffing bullets down the barrel of your gun. Nah, none of that. Lots of waiting around and smoking and moaning, dying bodies with no one to comfort them. Nightmares, and forgetting your gas mask and dying of preventable disease and never enough handkerchiefs to go around.</p>
<p>Yet he lies in a warrior’s coffin, lets his hand spool out to graze the surface of the water. Athens and Sparta, locked in this nebulous embrace, fingertips just touching across the muddy expanse of no-mans-land. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Alliances sprawled out, maps drawn with lines all through them. Takes a cartographer to understand. Don’t tread here. Or here. There’s ok, but watch for landmines.</p>
<p>Watch for amphora shards, too. Remnants of wine flowing red and nuptial miracles. <em>Twain-bearer. </em>Two-handled hold, bend at the knees. Lift up, just like that. They’re made to be portable, rocking in time on the water. Stack them against each other, in this little cargo hold, lock the door.</p>
<p>There were people here once, before us. They lived on this island, they stored their wine jugs where we’ve stationed our cannons. A mile out to sea, the cannonball soars, arcing upwards. As the crow flies, night-black and single-minded. Passes over their whole lives. Born at the bottom, near the beach, lived a life at this summit, this altitude looking out. Buried in the cemetery behind the church. Ceramic-stone marker at their head. Look east, there’s an angel there. To light your way, to guard you. Rule and guide. Follow him, he’ll lead you from this hillside darkness, out from under this cannonball shadow. Take comfort in the shadow of his wings.</p>
<p>Crowley could lay here until the stars come out. A new map etched into the heavens, rivaling its earthly counterpart. He’d come into Kalokairi from Athens, Aziraphale from Thessaly. They’d met on the same well-travelled road, the same winding dust curves. He could stay here, but he won’t, floating on the current-rivers. He drifts back to Kalokairi, returns like the tide, filling the rockpools and dampening the sand, wiping out the footprints each morning.</p>
<p>The boat bounces against the shore, and Crowley scrambles out, into the knee-deep water, to prevent the boat from capsizing. The late afternoon light beams off the sandy beach, a little further down. The sand is crisp and golden, Midas-touched. A shivering, rippling mass of water-beaten rock. Silicon-based. If you get it hot enough, it will meld together, form glass. A mirror for Narcissus, when the water cannot suffice. There’s one speck in all the grandeur. Someone laying out. Crowley squints through his sunglasses, even pulls them down momentarily for a better look.</p>
<p>It can’t be Aziraphale. He moves closer. It’s definitely Aziraphale. He’s lying on his back, underneath a tartan beach towel, eyes closed. He’s in khaki shorts and a blue short-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned. Hands crossed high over his chest. The whole of him, the towel and the shorts and his pale skin, framed against the sand. It’s like he belongs there, in the shadowless, sunny rockdust, safe from the tide darkening his door. Apollonian, marbled beauty. In him there is no darkness at all.</p>
<p>Crowley shifts in his deep purple get-up, feels his trousers sticking to his calves, his underarms beginning to sweat. He grits his teeth, having previously been in control of that particular function. He starts to regret the velvet jacket. “Aziraphale?”</p>
<p>Aziraphale jolts upright, limbs uncharacteristically flailing helter-skelter. “Oh! Crowley, do pardon me, I must have drifted off.” He tries to straighten himself out and winces. Pain fractures through his face, amphora jar cracking. Clay coming unknit, crumbling. Crowley can hear it, the rending, a hearthstone tearing from its molding.</p>
<p>Crowley is at his side in a second, hating it, trying to reach for Aziraphale. His knees are digging into the sand, his boots are skidding against it. “What is it?”</p>
<p>Aziraphale flutters a hand over his chest. “My dear boy, I do believe I’ve been <em>sun-burnt.</em>”</p>
<p>Crowley peers at him. The strip of skin visible between the unbuttoned sides of his shirt, is in fact clay-red and aggravated. “Oh.” Crowley snaps his fingers, miracles up a brightly-striped umbrella to shade them, and a folded towel under Aziraphale’s head. He drops one hand, hovering over Aziraphale’s chest. “May I?”</p>
<p>Aziraphale nods, lies back down. He guides himself downwards, his spine finding the towel, lowering deliberately, each vertebrae laying itself down in turn.</p>
<p>Crowley feathers his hand down Aziraphale’s chest, drifting over his sternum, over the slope of his stomach. “I can fix this.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale turns his head towards him, cracks open his eyes, blinks once. Sea-blue, in and out, like waves. Flashing-eyed and piercing. Six thousand years, nearly, and never had a sunburn. “Alright.”</p>
<p>Crowley moves, straddles Aziraphale, his damp, sand-coated knees pushing into Aziraphale’s ample love handles. The sand is hot underneath him, Aziraphale’s sides soft. He shoves the shirt aside, rucked up around Aziraphale’s shoulders, so his whole chest is bared before him. There is no breastplate between them, no more waistcoat armor, done up in buttons and laces and a hundred hooks-and-eyes. His own aegis, chainmail between him and the world. Cloaked in something familiar, so unquestionably <em>him. </em>Crowley thinks back, through years of togas and hose and doublets. Ascots and ruffs and Windsor knots. Crowley eyes the thin, blond layer of hair lightly covering Aziraphale’s chest and stomach, soft and downy, the last line of defense.</p>
<p>Crowley has recently started keeping plants. He heard once, on a reputable radio programme, that it’s beneficial to talk to them, so he does. He’s all about communication. Reads to them from the back of the fertilizer bottle and <em>Silent Spring </em>and the <em>International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Plants. </em>His plants, <em>asphodelus aestivus</em> and <em>carduus benedictus</em> and <em>circis siliquastram, </em>are, perhaps, the best-informed plants in all of London. They know precisely what is expected of them, and the consequences if they don’t deliver it. He likes leafy ones, troublesome ones, picky and finicky and dainty ones. Particular about water and sunshine and nutrients. Temperature-controlled and light-sensitive, south-facing windows only. Crowley has a lot of glass in his apartment, he’s very accommodating. As long as they perform appropriately.</p>
<p>Along with these fusspots, he’s got some succulents. They’re <em>nice</em>, although he’d never admit it. Spiny and pointy, teeth sticking out, curled in on the flesh of themselves. But soft to the touch, pleasant to run your finger along the stems. He’s got aloes, has made cuttings, peeled away the green skin to reveal the gel inside. Pure aloe vera gel is essentially the elixir of life. Soothed burns, good for teeth, edible.</p>
<p>Crowley pulls on his moustache, bending it out from his skin like the exterior of the aloe plant from the gel. Makes a small anatomical adjustment. Sebum is rather ridiculous, he muses, as a watery gel begins to secrete from the hair follicles of his moustache. He smears it on his fingers, gathers it in his palm. Then, very carefully and gently, he lights his hands to Aziraphale’s stomach. “Is this alright?” He fastidiously avoids eye contact.</p>
<p>“Yes,” Aziraphale says breathily, letting his head flop back onto the towel.</p>
<p>Crowley rubs the aloe into Aziraphale’s skin, the soft folds of his stomach, his chest, pectoral muscles subtly apparent. He moves his hands in time to Aziraphale’s breath, in and out. Tide filling his rockpool lungs, rushing back out again. He works his way up, as gently as he can. He is nearing Aziraphale’s collarbone, worrying about how to ask to touch his neck without accidentally implying strangulation. He thinks of his fingers on Aziraphale’s windpipe, his Adam’s apple, cooling pressure, careful soothing. His two-count pulse, under Crowley’s first two fingers. Timing the beats, there in the hull of his neck, under his chin, pressing against his jawbone. He’s hesitating, fingers light on Aziraphale’s clavicle, when he hears a sudden splashing behind him. He whips around to look, his spine spiraling like a conch shell. As if at Poseidon’s behest, a swarm of men with swim fins are legging it out of the ocean, whooping.</p>
<p>“Shit, Aziraphale, let’s get out of here.” Crowley swings himself off of Aziraphale frantically, smacking the sand from his knees. “Not in the mood to be swept up in a bacchanal.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale rouses himself, sits up calmly. “I do believe those are the groomsmen, but nevertheless, I agree. We should leave them to it.”</p>
<p>Crowley thinks of loaves and fishes. Twelve wicker baskets left over. He holds out a hand to help Aziraphale up, and he takes it gratefully. Crowley leads Aziraphale up the beach, a sheep without a shepherd, not knowing how to tend his own sunburn. He lugs the picnic basket alongside. It hits against his thigh with every step.</p>
<p>Aziraphale drops his hand, reaches around for the picnic basket. Crowley immediately regrets his distraction, not taking the time to memorize the feel of Aziraphale’s hand, to find the lifeline, the heart line. How long have we got? What is the rhythm of your heartbeat? Can I feel the pulse at your wrist?</p>
<p>“Thank you.” Aziraphale sets down the basket and coyly begins to button his shirt. “I feel much better.” He stops with the top three buttons still undone, mirroring Crowley’s artfully plunging neckline.</p>
<p>“Course, angel.” Crowley shuffles his feet a little, needing desperately to shake out the sand from his boots.</p>
<p>“What was that substance, by the way, in case I need more?”</p>
<p>“Aloe vera,” Crowley says, roughly.</p>
<p>“Aloe vera,” Aziraphale repeats thoughtfully. “Hm, I always thought of that as a lubricant.”</p>
<p>Crowley flushes. “It, uh, yeah, it has, you know, medicinal properties, too.”</p>
<p>“As you so expertly demonstrated,” Aziraphale teases.</p>
<p>“Not really an expert.” Crowley kicks at the sand.</p>
<p>“Mmm.” Aziraphale hums neutrally, as if to disagree. “Say, my dear, are you going to the wedding ceremony for that <em>dear</em> girl from the villa? Married, and only twenty.” His eyes mist over. “How truly blessed-“</p>
<p>“Alright, alright, cut it out with the angelic whatsit,” Crowley says irritably. “Of course I’m not going. I prefer having feet to walk on. I’ve got to stay behind and figure out how to rope the mother of the bride into a tax evasion scheme. All very complicated, you wouldn’t understand.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale shrugs. “Suit yourself.” He lifts the basket easily, balancing it on the crook of his elbow, like a mother with a shopping basket, and turns to walk away.</p>
<p>“You’ll be at the reception too, right?” Crowley calls after him, suddenly regretting his abrasiveness. “Need someone to thwart my debauchery.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale lifts a hand in acknowledgement, but doesn’t slow his pace.</p>
<p>“Tickety boo,” Crowley mutters under his breath, as the line of men in flippers prance between him and Aziraphale. He steels himself for the climb to the villa, to spend the evening schmoozing with the staff and miracling fraudulent documents, stuck with the scent of calla lilies and wedding cake and teenage infatuation in his nose. It itches. He smooths down his velvet jacket, readjusts his moustache, his sunglasses, his hair. For the first time in a long time, he prays. <em>To the muses and memory, I am but a shade, yet spare me oblivion.</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Catch me on <a href="https://theseedsofdoom.tumblr.com">tumblr</a> eternally thinking about how Crowley plays God with his plants, but makes sure if they displease him they know <i>exactly</i> why (knowledge never afforded to him).</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Take A Chance on Me (I'm Still Free)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>CW for alcohol consumption, although it's pretty lowkey.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Crowley flits around the chivary chairs, laurel-draped. He’s prowling, waiting for the wedding to be over, for Aziraphale to return, for the bar to open. He tugs his jacket tighter around himself, buttons and unbuttons it. There’s three of them, ridges wearing and threads fraying from worried fingers. The weight of his pocket contents press against his left side. He feels it through his thin skin, papyrus wrinkled with age. Blood and water mingled with ink and resin.</p>
<p>The catering staff mingle in the center of the patio, cleared for the dancefloor. Crowley stands apart from them. He watches the staircase leading up to the villa relentlessly, unblinkingly. The reception will be held on the villa’s paved patio, large, heavy stones with generous caulking. Glued in place. He thinks of how the villa was built, thinks of stones borne up the mountain on carts, mules coaxed into complying. Perhaps they were slid up the hill, or carried somehow. Stones hefted to the summit, cemented into the skyline. Permanent residents. The summit is the goal, that’s the achievement, but that’s all it is. The mountain itself doesn’t matter, the spaces between here and the peak.</p>
<p>It feels odd, looking down. Playing at guardian angel, back turned on paradise to watch for a wretched sinner. Haul them up to grace. His neck goes stiff from the angle. Evening falls, darkness settles over them. The sea goes black, loses any semblance of meaning to Crowley, other than the great abyss he knows too well.</p>
<p>Finally, there is light from below. The staff scatters, tittering, running for cocktail trays and hors d’oeuvres platters. Crowley snags a shrimp canapé, munches it determinedly, getting cream cheese in his moustache. He seizes his opportunity and makes his way to the bar, quickly obtaining glasses of wine for him and Aziraphale. He waits down on the lower level for his appearance in the long line of wedding guests. Crowley dangles the wineglass from his fingertips. It doesn’t dare alter its temperature, remaining perfectly chilled. Ganymede. <em>Cup-bearer. </em>The servant of the gods, providing them golden nectar, ladling immortality into ichor-hued goblets. To sidle up alongside Zeus, to hold his lifeforce in his own two hands, sun-spotted and scarred, lined with six thousand years of cracking his knuckles.  </p>
<p>Aziraphale turns up eventually, lingering at the back of the procession. Crowley hands him a glass of wine without asking. He presses it into his hands, watches Aziraphale’s palms cup it from the bottom, the stem splitting his fingers. There’s an ease to it, an intimacy, passing glasses wordlessly. A familiarity, in anticipating what Aziraphale will want, preparing it for his arrival. Aziraphale doesn’t thank him. A drop of condensation slides down the side of the glass, catches on Aziraphale’s index finger.</p>
<p>Crowley clears his throat. “How’d it go?”</p>
<p>Aziraphale takes a sip of his wine. “I do hope I didn’t do the wrong thing.”</p>
<p>Crowley’s mind reels, the significance of Aziraphale’s words falling into place. A new heaven and a new earth, they’ve met in this middle ground. They know what’s coming, they know their time is limited. Why not play act at it? Why not start over, perched on the eastern gate, why not wait out the first rain storm again.</p>
<p>“It’s a wedding, angel. What could go wrong? Just, you know, make sure they say ‘I do’ or whatever they say nowadays.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale makes a face.</p>
<p>“Oh, no, you didn’t. Jilted? Mysterious third party? Full Midsummer, love dust and all?”</p>
<p>“No, no, none of that. You see-“ Aziraphale glares at Crowley as he groans-“the dear couple, they weren’t ready and their reasons weren’t good to begin with, but the <em>mother</em>, she’d been in love with this man for <em>decades</em>. So when the time came for it, I, well, I prodded things in the right direction. It didn’t seem like the wrong thing, at the time. But now,” Aziraphale lifted his glass to his mouth again and trailed off.</p>
<p>Crowley sighs. “I don’t think you <em>can </em>do the wrong thing. Just, human relationships aren’t really fruitful ground for meddling.”</p>
<p>“I wasn’t <em>meddling. </em>I can sense love. It was just a little nudge.”</p>
<p>“Over a cliff.” Crowley is suddenly on the defensive, hackles raised. He has serious doubts about Aziraphale’s ability to sniff out love. Surely he would have been uncovered by now. Isn’t there so much of it, always? Sure, humans are nasty and brutish and short, there is nothing they hate like the customer service interaction or the preternaturally delayed train. Human lives are full of barriers to love, but they do it anyway. Love tactless grandmothers and snot-nosed children and stray dogs and bad movies. They reread books and save up money to go to the ocean and watch the same terrible football team every season for decades. The miasma of love that hangs like smog over humanity is completely unparseable. There is no making sense of it, no fumbling through it to find the corners of the jigsaw puzzle. It has to be just an atmosphere, a breeze that blew of its own accord. How hadn’t Aziraphale notice how love peeled off him in waves, shut down his nervous system, locked his vocal cords shut (open my lips, and my mouth will proclaim your praise).</p>
<p>Aziraphale doesn’t respond to Crowley. He sips his wine primly, puckers his lips, stiffens them thinly to let the wine in. The tension hangs humid in the air. Crowley re-runs the conversation, trying to pinpoint where it veered out of his control and how to reign it back in. He comes up empty-handed. Instead, they sit down to a stilted dinner.</p>
<p>Aziraphale wipes his mouth, finishes gathering up as much of the salad dressing as he can, and licks it off the fork somewhat obscenely. “Did you scam that poor woman yet?” he asks, condescendingly.</p>
<p>“Nah, no need. She’s gone and married for money. Basically the same as tax evasion.”</p>
<p>“She married for love!” Aziraphale protests, his hand coming to rest on the table, pressing down into it.</p>
<p>“Yeah, love of money.”</p>
<p>“Coincidental,” Aziraphale insists.</p>
<p>“Can’t prove that. The human psyche is notoriously resistant to anything cut-and-dry, divisible motives, you know.”</p>
<p>“Does it matter, in the end? We both got what we came for.”</p>
<p>“I thought you came for a holiday,” Crowley points out.</p>
<p>“Goodness is ever-vigilant.”</p>
<p>“Clock out, Aziraphale. We’re at a wedding.”</p>
<p>“Can’t. Have to turn the water into wine.” Aziraphale demonstrates with a wave of his hand, then takes a sip. “Mmm.” He licks his lips and closes his eyes, and Crowley wonders why he ever bothered dashing back and forth to France when he could have been drinking indecently good wine all along, just by handing Aziraphale bottled river water.</p>
<p>Crowley dumps his water into his wineglass. “Top me off, angel.”</p>
<p>“Best not,” Aziraphale counters, but obliges anyway.</p>
<p>There’s a dancefloor in the center of the patio, just open space on the cobblestones. A band from the village strikes up, and Crowley scowls about the overuse of the accordion in what is, seemingly, only an ABBA cover band. He wishes the Bentley were here, so he could hear a little Queen.</p>
<p>He decides to break the ice, take a little risk. He’s relieved, secretly. Aziraphale had actually done him a big favor. He’s off the hook with work now, doesn’t need to worry about tax evasion. Just write up the report with very selective embellishment, and everything will be perfect. Who cares. He has so little dignity anyway. He turns to Aziraphale, reaches out a hand casually. “Dance?”</p>
<p>Aziraphale shakes his head mutely, watching the wedding party flood the dancefloor.</p>
<p>Just then, the stone in the middle of the dancefloor, engraved with a dolphin, cracks loudly. Water shoots up, from some underground spring. It geysers into the air, soaking everyone.</p>
<p>Aziraphale grabs Crowley’s arm, fingers crushing the wet velvet of his sleeve. “It’s Sappho.”</p>
<p>Crowley paws at his moustache, trying to prevent it from frizzing. “What?”</p>
<p>“You remember, I came here, oh, I came here because there’s an early shrine to Sappho on Kalokairi. This is it, this is the shrine.” Aziraphale’s face is glowing. He’s not dropping hold of Crowley’s arm. Water mists his hair, beads slowly and drops on his forehead, his coat and bowtie and trousers and brogues are getting drenched but he doesn’t seem to care.</p>
<p>Crowley turns to him in wonderment, and Aziraphale slips his arm around his more comfortably. Crowley wants to ask him to dance again, to sway awkward and juvenile, but he’s content for a moment for Aziraphale to capture his arm and keep it there, to hold it. They can be stationary. Instead he says, “What’s with the water?”</p>
<p>Aziraphale laughs, water dripping off the end of his nose and catching on his eyelashes and falling into his open mouth. “The shrine is the spring, it was dedicated to her, and then paved over. She’s come back.”</p>
<p>“She’s come back,” Crowley repeats, thinking of drawing up plans to rob a church. Thinks of orange-cast light, of the miniscule distance between hands. Come back. Risen from the dead, woken from slumber. Tossed out into the neon-light alley, blinking. Centuries of stony sleep.</p>
<p>The band has recovered from the geyser spray, and resumes playing with no concern for the state of their instruments. “Dance with me,” Crowley says. A request, not a question. There’s no hedging. With me. Come back. Let me spin you out, our hands clenched tight, you will roll yourself in, right next to me, back to chest, my heart beating its way up your spine. Sisyphus, carrying his heart to the top of the hill.</p>
<p>There’s nothing to fear. The dance floor is full of wedding guests. The relationships need no definition. They dance. <em>Take a chance on me. </em></p>
<p>Crowley is not a very good dancer. Aziraphale can do exactly one dance, that had gone out of fashion in the last century, but that didn’t stop him. They dance.</p>
<p>Crowley can see the blackness of the ocean. Maybe he’s at the top of the mountain right now, maybe he’s spent ten years rolling upwards, the weight of a thermos a thorn in his side. Maybe, it was worth it. He takes a deep breath, lets his chest expand, his lungs fill and rise. He’s at the summit. He reaches for Aziraphale. He takes him by the shoulder. <em>He came back. </em></p>
<p>We must imagine Sisyphus happy. We must imagine that he is content to roll his boulder up the hill, this mountain at the end of the universe, again and again. We must imagine he pauses, halfway, to dance in the rain. We must imagine he enjoys the view from the top, that there is some great letting go in watching the boulder tumble back down.</p>
<p>It gets heavier. Picks up dirt, snowballing among the crags. It falls at the same rate, every time. Galileo proved that for us, dropping cannonballs off the Tower of Pisa.</p>
<p>Crowley will wear down the mountain eventually. Sharpening his beak, once every thousand years. Then what? The end of the universe? Just Crowley and this mountain, kneaded like bread dough in his crooked hands. Every pebble bears his mark, he’s left his skin-dust atoms on every clod of dirt.</p>
<p>Maybe he’d plant a garden.</p>
<p>Crowley exhales. Deflating, the rock tips over the peak. Aziraphale looks at him in surprise, instinctively reaches for his elbow.</p>
<p>“What is it?”</p>
<p>“D’you wanna, uh, go down to the beach?” He lets go. Chooses it this time. Zeus is uninvolved (I’m still free). He’ll descend this time, with hope, not alone, not chasing after a rock. It’s not a punishment if he chooses it. Sauntering vaguely downwards. The boulder can wait. Right now Crowley’s free, weightless, unhindered and unbowed.</p>
<p>What would happen, if he just refused to pick it back up? What force is there to observe him in the great vacuum between the base and the summit? What mechanism is there to keep him in place for eternity? There is no god to whom he owes allegiance.</p>
<p>He thinks of it. He would build his house, not on sand, but on stone. A firm foundation, safe from the dusk-born winds and the brazen-hoofed waves (take a chance, take a chance, take a chance).</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Sometimes you get sucked down the rabbit hole of Puritan baby names and early 2000s fandom drama, but not at the same time. What you are doing at the same time is having a crisis, hence your chapter going up six days late with half the usual editing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯<br/>Procrastinate with me on <a href="https://theseedsofdoom.tumblr.com">tumblr.</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Waterloo (Finally Facing My Waterloo)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They slouch down to the beach. Well, Crowley slouches. They descend into the dark, the barren fields of the Underworld spread before them. The dreary desolation of the rest of time.</p>
<p>Crowley inhales. The ocean is still lapping against the shores, a quiet in-and-out, a steadybreath escape route. They can’t look back, salt and lyres littered in their wake. The stars shine bright. Alpha Centuari, just four and a third light years away. A distance crossable in a human lifetime.</p>
<p>He offers Aziraphale his arm. His eyes are better in the dark, even behind the purple lenses. Their sleeves slide against each other, wavebreak on the shore, as the tide comes in. The brush of cream camelhair against his deep purple velvet. Wine-dark. A cabernet stain on moon-pale fabric. How would he get the stain out? Shouldn’t he know? Aziraphale would. Salt, probably. Rub it against the wound, the blood red stain swelling under Aziraphale’s wrist, where it rests on top of Crowley’s forearm. Doesn’t Crowley know all about stains, about sulfur marks on the inside of his jackets? He thinks of the silt on the steps, the mud caking on the soles of their shoes. Sullying the heavenly temple, shaking sand from his corporation.</p>
<p>Human bodies are like that. Filled with gullies and niches and orifices. Pores and hair follicles and alcohol-sodden livers, tracked-in from their earthly experienceHideaways for sand to invade, irritate the skin, immutable reminders of the price of trodding the uncompromising Earth. He’d left behind markers too, even if he didn’t like it. Moustache hairs, empty wine bottles, the pollution from the taxi he’d taken to get here.</p>
<p>He thinks about missing the ferry, about being left alone on the end of a dock. He thinks of his thermos of holy water, two thousand miles away, safe and sound, locked up tight. How many servings in the bottle, how many shots, how many teacups. Seep tea into it, pour it over coffee grounds. The rituals of everyday life, do they preserve its sanctity? Or do they soil it with the stain of humanity? The tea leaves flavor the water without really touching it. Without being loosed onto it fully.</p>
<p>Aziraphale reaches out with his other hand, finds Crowley’s palm in the dark. String-calloused fingers. Lyres or heavenly harps, plucking away in the ninth choir. Crowley’s heart thumps. Out of tune, properly demonic. Crowley wonders if the “be not afraid” ever really worked. Six-winged seraphim, fire-essenced and terrifying. He breathes in the sea air, cannot divide the salt from it.</p>
<p>They reach the bottom of the steps. The beach spreads before them, a ring around the island. They could turn away from each other, walk in opposite directions, and find each other again. Circumnavigate it, a globe of their own devising. Leave tread marks on every dirt road, every vanity path humans eked out for themselves.</p>
<p>Crowley hasn’t thought this far ahead. Aziraphale seems content to keep going, heading down to the shoreline. He bends, unties his shoes and peels off his socks, stuffing them under the leather tongue of his brogues. He miracles a striped beach towel under them.</p>
<p>Aziraphale turns to Crowley. “Are you coming in? I fancied a bit of a dip.” He rolls his trousers up meticulously.</p>
<p>Crowley snaps his shoes and socks off, but doesn’t bother with his trousers. He steps forward, pushes into the wet, pliable sand, waiting for the next wave to come in.</p>
<p>There’s an hourglass between them. Grains of sand counting down the seconds. Are the bulbs half empty or half full? It’s only a matter of time. The glass must be blown in one piece, two bulbs with a thin connector between them. They are cut from whole cloth, a seamless garment, a fated, fraying thread between them.</p>
<p>“I’ve got something for you.” Crowley fumbles into his jacket pocket, a safe, well-padded, temperature-controlled lockbox dimension. He hands over a scroll.</p>
<p>Aziraphale’s eyes are wide as he begins to unroll it. “<em>Revelations. </em>Crowley. You didn’t. How did you-"</p>
<p>Crowley cuts him off, shrugging. “Know my way around Patmos.”</p>
<p>“What about the paleontologists?”</p>
<p>Crowley shrugs again, one-shouldered and frenetic. “They don’t care. Centuries after the dinosaurs.”</p>
<p>“Well then, I suppose I should say-"</p>
<p>“You don’t have to say anything. Please. Don’t.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale shifts to face him fully, the waves pooling around their ankles where they’ve sunken into the sand. He slips the scroll into a pocket dimension of his own devising. Both hands are free. He takes Crowley’s face in them. Crowley tenses at first. He’s heard all the propaganda. They can’t win if there isn’t a war. The logic is the same on either side. That’s how it works. Crowley understands that. He’s been in more war zones than any supernatural entity, bar one. You can’t win if there isn’t a surrender.</p>
<p>Aziraphale is caressing his cheekbones now, thumb swiping across the hollow expanse of his cheek. A graveyard, there on his face. Consecrated ground, under the blessing of Aziraphale’s fingers. He relaxes, lets the tension crumble like a bombed-out church. Stone facades and flying buttresses, a steeple pointing fingers into the sky.</p>
<p>Crowley pulls back. “Angel, I-“</p>
<p>Aziraphale doesn’t move, even as his hand is jerked about by the motions of Crowley’s mouth as he speaks, the drop of his jaw. “I understand now, Crowley.”</p>
<p>“There shouldn’t have to be a war. I don’t want to get caught up in any more wars.”</p>
<p>“I know.” Aziraphale brushes the hair from Crowley’s eyes, smoothing it with his fingers against the winds roiling off the sea.</p>
<p>Eight years ago men landed on the moon. Crowley had squinted at the disk in the sky, hoping wildly he’d see their tiny forms along its ringed edge, soldiering on in the graydust sunlight. The moon has one-sixth the gravity of earth. Burdens are one sixth the weight. Crowley longs to take Aziraphale to some dwarf planet, on the outer edges of the galaxy, well-lit but featherlight. Unyoke him from these waterpails, make the burden easy.</p>
<p>Aziraphale would never leave, he knows. It’s far-fetched, ridiculous. Aziraphale will want to stay, to protect all the sunlight he can pull down through the ozone layer. All the darkness in the world, the entire vacuum of space, tides of dark matter flowing between them, cannot put out one small candle.</p>
<p>In this moment, Aziraphale is calm, a steady, burgeoning flame. He straightens his shoulders, rolls them back, and fear melts off him, condensation off a water glass. Runs into the sea, bubbles up in the surf around their ankles. One wave recedes and the next rolls in. Aziraphale sets down the yoke, the waterpail burdens. He’s spent so long, both hands occupied with trying futilely not to spill a single drop. As if the world would be poorer for one more drop in the ocean. As if one small, carefully-poured thermosful of holy water could compete with the Poseidon-governed ocean.</p>
<p>Aziraphale’s hands pull Crowley to his chest, lift him to his common-time heart. Crowley glimpses the stars one last time, before his entire field of vision is Aziraphale. It doesn’t matter what he can see. The stars are imprinted on his eyelids, the constellations connected in his head, a zodiac thread running through history. Twelve constellations. Twins and scales and archers. There’s a thirteenth abutting it. On the outskirts of the sky. Not fit for their pantheon, their peerage. Carrying the weight of a serpent too heavy for their comprehension. Ophiuchus. <em>Serpent bearer. </em>A Hippocratic oath etched into the stars, a promise to protect even the dwarf stars’ dim light, to keep the candles burning in the windows, to light the way home.</p>
<p>Aziraphale guides Crowley down, onto the beach towel he’d laid out earlier, shoves his shoes away into the sand, leaves them to the mercy of the creeping tide. He lays a finger against Crowley’s glasses. “May I?”</p>
<p>Crowley chokes out assent, nods emphatically. Aziraphale lifts his glasses away with infinite care and concentration, preventing the arms from catching on Crowley’s ears. He sets them aside, still with reach of Crowley. Consideration. Just in case. Crowley never imagines he’d face this. Aziraphale’s thumbs circling the black plastic buttons on his jacket.</p>
<p>Aziraphale undoes the buttons on his shirt, fingers tangling in the ruffles. Crowley’s Prometheus-stomach is bared to the sky, open to Zeus’s eagles. The Greeks viewed the liver as the seat of emotion, the seat of humanity. Aziraphale kisses his way down his stomach, and Crowley feels renewal. He is defended from Zeus by one hunched figure, two hungry lips and two cradling hands. He’s been thrown off the pantheon, devolved in flames. He learned to control them, to set them atop a torch and give light. He offered them to creation with disinterest. Just making some trouble. He never thought knowledge would be so painful. But now Aziraphale knows him, knows his body, and he feels their twinned hearts. How do humans bear it all, in such small bodies, in such compressed lifespans.</p>
<p>He pulls Aziraphale up his chest to kiss him. They are flat against each other, the seven buttons of Aziraphale’s waistcoat digging into his ribs. On the sixth day, She removed Adam’s rib, molded Eve from it. Designed her skin and bones and muscles, her incisor teeth and soft palate and jawhinge. Eve’s bone-born fingertips, wreathed in sun-kissed skin, had brushed Crowley’s skull, right between his eyes, where a lock of Aziraphale’s hair now rests. Aziraphale’s nose in his moustache. Crowley pants and whines and holds on and pulls Aziraphale closer and <em>knows. </em>On the seventh day She rested.</p>
<p>“Crowley.” Aziraphale raises himself off Crowley, hovering just a few inches above him. The cool air rushes over him and Crowley makes a noise of protest. Aziraphale smiles, props himself on one hand, using the other to brush through Crowley’s hair with his fingers. “I seem to recall you can produce some fantastic things with that moustache. Aloe vera?”</p>
<p>“Yeah,” Crowley says, clipped and breathless.</p>
<p>“If you’d be amenable?” Aziraphale raises his eyebrows expectantly.</p>
<p>“Ngk.” Crowley knocks Aziraphale’s arm out, sending him back on top of him. Pressed together. “Very amenable, me.”</p>
<p>Aziraphale is the breathless one now. Their chests heave in time. Crowley can see the stars again, while Aziraphale runs his fingers along his moustache, slicking himself up, but he pays them no heed. He instead focuses on the constellation of buttons on Aziraphale’s shirt, each one more pristine and beautiful than Crowley’s millennia-old artwork, his fingerpaints in the sky. Aziraphale’s chest is open to him, and he presses into his soft stomach with his spiral galaxy thumbprints. Aziraphale’s skin gives under his grasp, and he feels like a sculptor, of something infinitely more beautiful and awe-inspiring than gas and dust. He thinks of the lifetimes of stars. Stars do not go gently, they explode in white light, spread their lifeforce throughout the universe. There’s a supernova inside him, somewhere. Aziraphale will coax it out of him. Whitelight fusion, a surrender, the connector bar of the hourglass, a flag plunged into the nomansland. <em>Promise to love you forevermore.</em></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Wahoo we made it! Yeah this took *checks watch* too damn long to finish but in my defense *incomprehensible wingdings*<br/>This fic was a Learning and Growing experience for me, which I'm happy about. My main source for this was Edith Hamilton's <em>Mythology</em>, although I honestly didn't use it very much. <br/>Keep an eye out for some more Astronomy Omens hopefully not TOO far down the line :)<br/>Thanks for reading! Find me on <a href="https://theseedsofdoom.tumblr.com">tumblr.</a></p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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